by Lee Child
“How long has this thing been in here?” he asked from the floor.
“I don’t know.”
“When did he put the lock on the door?”
“Maybe two months ago.”
Reacher stood up again.
“What did you expect to find?” the woman asked him.
Reacher turned to face her and looked at her eyes. The pupils were huge.
“More of what you had for breakfast,” he said.
She smiled. “You thought Jeb was cooking in here?”
“Wasn’t he?”
“His stepfather brings it by.”
“You married?”
“Not anymore. But he still brings it by.”
“Jeb was using on Monday night,” Reacher said.
The woman smiled again. “A mother can share with her kid. Can’t she? What else is a mother for?”
Reacher turned away and looked at the truck one more time. “Why would he keep an old truck locked in here and a new truck out in the weather?”
“Beats me,” the woman said. “Jeb always does things his own way.”
Reacher backed out of the barn and walked each door closed. Then he used the balls of his thumbs to press the bolts back into their splintered holes. The weight of the lock dragged them all halfway out again. He got it looking as neat as he could, and then he left it alone and walked away.
“Is Jeb ever coming back?” the woman called after him.
Reacher didn’t answer.
The Mustang was facing north, so Reacher drove north. He put the CD player on loud and kept going ten miles down an arrow-straight road, aiming for a horizon that never arrived.
Raskin dug his own grave with a Caterpillar backhoe. It was the same machine that had been used to level the Zec’s land. It had a twenty-inch entrenching shovel with four steel teeth on it. The shovel took long slow bites of the soft earth and laid them aside. The engine roared and slowed, roared and slowed, and pulsed clouds of diesel exhaust filled the Indiana sky.
Raskin had been born during the Soviet Union, and he had seen a lot. Afghanistan, Chechnya, unthinkable upheaval in Moscow. A guy in his position could have been dead many times over, and that fact combined with his natural Russian fatalism made him utterly indifferent to his fate.
“Ukase,” the Zec had said. An order from an absolute authority.
“Nichevo,” Raskin had said in reply. Think nothing of it.
So he worked the backhoe. He chose a spot concealed from the stone-crushers’ view by the bulk of the house. He dug a neat trench twenty inches wide, six feet long, six feet deep. He piled the excavated earth to his right, to the east, like a high barrier between himself and home. When he was finished he backed the machine away from the hole and shut it down. Climbed down from the cab and waited. There was no escape. No point in running. If he ran, they would find him anyway, and then he wouldn’t need a grave. They would use garbage bags, five or six of them. They would use wire ties to seal the several parts of him into cold black plastic. They would put bricks in with his flesh and throw the bags in the river.
He had seen it happen before.
In the distance the Zec came out of his house. A short wide man, ancient, stooped, walking at a moderate speed, exuding power and energy. He picked his way across the uneven ground, glancing down, glancing forward. Fifty yards, a hundred. He came close to Raskin and stopped. He put his ruined hand in his pocket and came out with a small revolver, his thumb and the stump of his index finger pincered through the trigger guard. He held it out, and Raskin took it from him.
“Ukase,” the Zec said.
“Nichevo,” Raskin replied. A short, amiable, self-deprecating sound, like de rien in French, like de nada in Spanish, like prego in Italian. Please. I’m yours to command.
“Thank you,” the Zec said.
Raskin stepped away to the narrow end of the trench. Opened the revolver’s cylinder and saw a single cartridge. Closed the cylinder again and turned it until it was lined up right. Then he pulled the hammer back and put the barrel in his mouth. He turned around, so that he was facing the Zec and his back was to the trench. He shuffled backward until his heels were on the edge of the hole. He stood still and straight and balanced and composed, like an Olympic diver preparing for a difficult backward pike off the high board.
He closed his eyes.
He pulled the trigger.
For a mile around black crows rose noisily into the air. Blood and brain and bone arced through the sunlight in a perfect parabola. Raskin’s body fell backward and landed stretched out and flat in the bottom of the trench. The crows settled back to earth and the faint noise of the distant stone-crushing machines rolled back in and sounded like silence. Then the Zec clambered up into the Caterpillar’s cab and started the engine. The levers all had knobs as big as pool balls, which made them easy to manipulate with his palms.
Reacher stopped fifteen miles north of the city and parked the Mustang on a big V-shaped gravel turnout made where the corners of two huge circular fields met. There were fields everywhere, north, south, east, and west, one after the other in endless ranks and files. Each one had its own irrigation boom. Each boom was turning at the same slow, patient pace.
He shut the engine down and slid out of the seat. He stood and stretched and yawned. The air was full of mist from the booms. Up close, the booms were like massive industrial machines. Like alien spaceships recently landed. There was a central vertical standpipe in the middle of each field, like a tall metal chimney. The boom arm came off it horizontally and bled water out of a hundred spaced nozzles all along its length. At the outer end the arm had a vertical leg supporting its weight. At the bottom of the leg was a wheel with a rubber tire. The wheel was as big as an airplane’s landing gear. It rolled around a worn track, endlessly.
Reacher watched and waited until the wheel in the nearest field came close. He walked over and stepped alongside it. Kept pace with it. The tire came almost to his waist. The boom itself was way over his head. He kept the wheel on his right and tracked it through its long clockwise circle. He was walking through fine mist. It was cold. The boom hissed loudly. The wheel climbed gentle rises and rolled into low depressions. It was a long, long circle. The boom was maybe a hundred and fifty feet long, which made the perimeter track more than three hundred yards. Pi times diameter. Area was pi times the radius squared, which would therefore be more than seventy-eight hundred square yards. More than one and a half acres. Which meant that the wasted corners added up to a little less than twenty-two hundred square yards. More than twenty-one percent. More than five hundred square yards in each corner. Like the shapes in the corners of a target. The Mustang was parked on one of the corners, proportionally the same size as a bullet hole.
Like one of Charlie’s bullet holes, in the corners of the paper.
Reacher arrived back where he had started, a little wet, his boat shoes muddy. He stepped away from the circle and stood still on the gravel, facing west. On the far horizon a cloud of crows rose suddenly and then settled. Reacher got back in the car and turned the ignition on. Found the clamps on the header rail and the switch on the dash and lowered the roof. He checked his watch. He had two hours until his rendezvous at Franklin’s office. So he lay back in the seat and let the sun dry his clothes. He took the folded target out of his pocket and looked at it for a long time. He sniffed it. Held it up to the sun and let the light shine through the crisp round holes. Then he put it away again in his pocket. He stared upward and saw nothing but sky. He closed his eyes against the glare and started to think about ego and motive, and illusion and reality, and guilt and innocence, and the true nature of randomness.
CHAPTER 13
Emerson read through Bellantonio’s reports. Saw that Reacher had called Helen Rodin. He wasn’t surprised. It was probably just one of many calls. Lawyers and busybodies working hard to rewrite history. No big shock there. Then he read Bellantonio’s twin questions: Is Reacher left-handed? Did he have access to a
vehicle?
Answers: probably, and probably. Southpaws weren’t rare. Line up twenty people, and four or five of them would be left-handed. And Reacher had access to a vehicle now, that was for damn sure. He wasn’t in town, and he hadn’t left on a bus. Therefore he had a vehicle, and probably had had one all along.
Then Emerson read the final sheet: James Barr had been in Alexandra Dupree’s apartment. What the hell was that about?
According to Ann Yanni’s road maps Franklin’s office was dead-center in a tangle of streets right in the heart of the city. Not an ideal destination. Not by any means. Construction, the start of rush hour, slow traffic on surface streets. Reacher was going to be putting a lot of trust in the tint in the Ford Motor Company’s glass. That was for sure.
He started the motor and put the roof back up. Then he eased off the turnout and headed south. He repassed the Oliver place after twelve minutes, turned west on the county road, and then south again on the four-lane into town.
Emerson went back to Bellantonio’s cell phone report. Reacher had called Helen Rodin. They had business. They had matters to discuss. He would go back to her, sooner or later. Or she would go to him. He picked up the phone. Spoke to his dispatcher.
“Put an unmarked car on Helen Rodin’s office,” he said. “If she leaves the building, have her followed.”
Reacher drove past the motor court. He stayed low in the seat and glanced sideways. No sign of any activity. No obvious surveillance. He passed the barbershop, and the gun store. Traffic slowed him as he approached the raised highway. Then it slowed him more, to walking speed. His face was feet away from the pedestrians on his right. Feet away from the stalled drivers on his left. Four lanes of traffic, the two inbound lanes moving slow, the two outbound lanes static.
He wanted to get away from the sidewalk. He put his turn signal on and forced his way into the next lane. The driver behind his shoulder wasn’t happy. Don’t sweat it, Reacher thought. I learned to drive in a deuce-and-a-half. Time was when I would have rolled right over you.
The left-hand lane was moving a little faster. Reacher crept past cars on his right. Glanced ahead. There was a police cruiser three cars in front. In the right-hand lane. There was a green light in the distance. Traffic in the left-hand lane was approaching it slowly. Traffic in the right-hand lane was approaching it slower still. Each successive car reached the painted line and paused a moment and then jumped the gap. Nobody wanted to block the box. Now Reacher was two cars behind the cop. He hung back. The irritated guy behind him honked. Reacher inched forward. Now he was one car behind the cop.
The light went yellow.
The car in front of Reacher sprinted.
The light went red.
The cop stopped on the line and Reacher stopped directly alongside him.
He put his elbow on the console and cupped his head in his hand. Spread his fingers wide and covered as much of his face as he could. Stared straight head, up under the header rail, looking at the light, willing it to change.
Helen Rodin rode down two floors in the elevator and met Ann Yanni in the NBC reception area. NBC was paying for Franklin’s time, so it was only fair that Yanni should be at the conference. They rode down to the garage together and got into Helen’s Saturn. Came up the ramp and out into the sunshine. Helen glanced right and made a left. Didn’t register the gray Impala that moved off the curb twenty yards behind her.
The light stayed red an awful long time. Then it went green and the guy behind Reacher honked and the cop turned to look. Reacher took off through his field of vision and didn’t look back. He filtered into a left-turn lane and the cop car swept past on his right. Reacher watched it jam up again ahead. He didn’t want to go through the side-by-side thing again so he stuck with the left turn. Found himself back in the street with Martha’s grocery on it. It was clogged with slow traffic. He shifted on the seat and checked his pants pocket. Sifted through the coins by feel. Found a quarter. Debated with himself, twenty yards, thirty, forty.
Yes.
He pulled into Martha’s tiny lot. Left the engine running and slid out of the seat and danced around the hood to the pay phone on the wall. He put his quarter in the slot and took out Emerson’s torn card. Chose the station house number and dialed.
“Help you?” the desk guy said.
“Police?” Reacher asked.
“Go ahead, sir.”
Reacher kept his voice fast and light, rushed and low. “That guy on the Wanted poster? The thing you guys were passing around?”
“Yes, sir?”
“He’s right here, right now.”
“Where?”
“In my drive-through, the one on the four-lane north of town next to the tire store. He’s inside right now, at the counter, eating.”
“You sure it’s the guy?”
“Looks just like the picture.”
“Does he have a car?”
“Big red Dodge pickup.”
“Sir, what’s your name?”
“Tony Lazzeri,” Reacher said. Anthony Michael Lazzeri, batted .273 in 118 appearances at second base in 1935. Second-place finish. Reacher figured he would need to move around the diamond soon. The Yankees hadn’t had enough second basemen, or enough nonchampionship years.
“We’re on our way, sir,” the desk cop said.
Reacher hung up and slid back into the Mustang. Sat still until he heard the first sirens battling north.
Helen Rodin was halfway down Second Street when she caught a commotion in her mirror. A gray Impala sedan lurched out of the lane three cars behind her and pulled a crazy U-turn through the traffic and took off back the way it had come.
“Asshole,” she said.
Ann Yanni twisted in her seat.
“Cop car,” she said. “You can tell by the antennas.”
Reacher made it to Franklin’s place about ten minutes late. It was a two-story brick building. The lower floor looked like some kind of a light industrial unit, abandoned. It had steel shutters over its doors and windows. But the upstairs windows had venetian blinds with lights behind them. There was an outside staircase leading to an upper door. The door had a white plastic plate on it: Franklin Investigations. There was a parking apron at street level, just a patch of blacktop one-car deep and about six wide. Helen Rodin’s green Saturn was there, and a blue Honda Civic, and a black Chevy Suburban so long that it was overhanging the sidewalk by a foot. The Suburban was Franklin’s, Reacher guessed. The Honda was Rosemary Barr’s, maybe.
He drove past the place without slowing and circled the block. Saw nothing he didn’t want to see. So he slotted the Mustang next to the Saturn and got out and locked it. Ran up the staircase and went in the door without knocking. He found himself in a short hallway with a kitchenette to his right and what he guessed was a bathroom to his left. Up ahead he could hear voices in a large room. He went in and found Franklin at a desk, Helen Rodin and Rosemary Barr in two chairs huddled in conversation, and Ann Yanni looking out the window at her car. All four turned as he came in.
“Do you know any medical terminology?” Helen asked him.
“Like what?”
“PA,” she said. “A doctor wrote it. Some kind of an abbreviation.”
Reacher glanced at her. Then at Rosemary Barr.
“Let me guess,” he said. “The hospital diagnosed James Barr. Probably a mild case.”
“Early onset,” Rosemary said. “Whatever it is.”
“How did you know?” Helen asked.
“Intuition,” Reacher said.
“What is it?”
“Later,” Reacher said. “Let’s do this in order.” He turned to Franklin. “Tell me what you know about the victims.”
“Five random people,” Franklin said. “No connection between any of them. No real connection with anything at all. Certainly no connection to James Barr. I think you were absolutely right. He didn’t shoot them for any reason of his own.”
“No, I was absolutely wrong,” Reacher
said. “Thing is, James Barr didn’t shoot them at all.”
Grigor Linsky stepped back into a shadowed doorway and dialed his phone.
“I followed a hunch,” he said.
“Which was?” the Zec asked.
“With the cops at the lawyer’s office, I figured the soldier wouldn’t be able to go see her. But obviously they still have business. So I thought maybe she would go to him. And she did. I followed her. They’re together in the private detective’s office right now. With the sister. And that woman from the television news.”
“Are the others with you?”
“We’ve got the whole block covered. East, west, north, and south.”
“Sit tight,” the Zec said. “I’ll get back to you.”
Helen Rodin said, “You want to explain that statement?”
“The evidence is rock solid,” Franklin said.
Ann Yanni smiled. A story.
Rosemary Barr just stared.
“You bought your brother a radio,” Reacher said to her. “A Bose. For the ballgames. He told me that. Did you ever buy him anything else?”
“Like what?”
“Like clothes.”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“Pants?”
“Sometimes,” she said.
“What size?”
“Size?” she repeated blankly.
“What size pants does your brother wear?”
“Thirty-four waist, thirty-four leg.”
“Exactly,” Reacher said. “He’s relatively tall.”
“How does this help us?” Helen asked.
“You know anything about numbers games?” Reacher asked her. “Old-fashioned illegal numbers, state lotteries, the Powerball, things like that?”
“What about them?”
“What’s the hardest part of them?”
“Winning,” Ann Yanni said.
Reacher smiled. “From the players’ point of view, sure. But the hardest part for the organizers is picking truly random numbers. True randomness is very hard for humans to achieve. In the old days numbers runners used the business pages in the newspapers. They would agree in advance, maybe the second page of the stock prices, maybe the second column, the last two figures in the first six prices quoted. Or the last six, or the middle six, or whatever. That came close to true randomness. Now the big lotteries use complicated machines. But you can find mathematicians who can prove the results aren’t truly random. Because humans built the machines.”
